Urban Meyer doubles down on calls for College Football Playoff committee to end

The penultimate College Football Playoff rankings debuted on Tuesday night, giving everyone a pretty good idea which teams are in, which teams are out and which remain on the bubble heading into conference championship weekend. The rankings also exposed some flaws.

The selection committee still has a number of issues it’s under fire for, from head-to-head and how much it matters, to just how much stock should be put into conference title games. FOX Sports analyst Urban Meyer sees a problem.

“The committee’s got to go away. It’s got to go away,” Meyer said on The Triple Option podcast. “I said that earlier today, and I’m not saying… I mean if there’s 40, 50, 60 years of experience between us and we can’t agree on everything, I just can’t understand how you can penalize Texas for losing at Ohio State.

“If ‘Bama loses in that (SEC Championship) Game, you cannot penalize them. That’s a reward. Season’s over unless you win. You cannot do that. I don’t understand. Like if BYU beats Texas Tech, of course Texas Tech is in. A lot of things come across my mind, I’m just worried about the future of our game, and I know we’re talking about this.”

Every move the College Football Playoff selection committee makes will bring a reaction and a counter-reaction by the schools themselves. There’s a trickle-down effect.

College programs get to build their own schedules to a certain extent. So there’s some control when it comes to owning the metrics the committee will later use to decide things.

But it makes for some wild swings. Not everything is equal, which Meyer pointed out was the problem with co-host Mark Ingram and his solution to the College Football Playoff issue.

“What needs to happen, coach, is in the NFL you have a division,” Ingram said. “You win the division, that gives you an automatic bid. The next three best records get in. There’s no bias. It’s straight what it is. College football needs to come to some type of structure where it mirrors that.”

Meyer doesn’t think that can happen in college football. Not with the way the sport is currently set up. And right now, he sees one program taking full advantage of the way the College Football Playoff is set up.

“The NFL is all equal,” Meyer said. “You can’t have Old Dominion, Kennesaw State… right now Indiana is playing chess, everybody else is playing checkers. If Texas played this (Indiana schedule), Texas would be in the playoffs for college football. Indiana State, Kennesaw State and Old Dominion.”

Meyer theorized that Indiana’s success the last two years in the College Football Playoff, after playing one of the weakest schedules in the FBS, would start to have a knock-on effect. Others will do the same.

“You’re going to see the worst non-conference schedules in the history of our game,” Meyer said. “As you saw Alabama just dropped USF.”